that; increased use of reduced sentencing, in accordance with the spirit of the so-called Prisons Act of 24th November 2009; in this latter area, giving priority above all to sustainable measures that facilitate rehabilitation, rather than short-term procedures which, while admittedly useful, are without significant quantitative effect (such as electronic tagging). The assessment took a stand on two points that, after publication, gave rise to discussion; which is a very satisfactory situation. In the first place, reservations were expressed with regard to the idea of applying numerus clausus to prisons, in order to reduce inmate numbers. It was inferred therefrom that the Contrôleur général, in spite of the fact that its purpose is to improve the protection of the fundamental rights of persons deprived of liberty, was, in reality, against any reform; as though the refusal to prescribe a dangerous medicine amounted to opposition to healing in general. Numerus clausus is not a new idea and, indeed, outstanding thinkers have defended it with conviction. Nevertheless, its legal feasibility is highly questionable, that is to say, its compatibility with our norms, and constitutional norms in particular. Moreover, this idea is based upon the following mechanism: when a prison is deemed unable to receive new prisoners, due to the size of its existing inmate population: either releases are brought into play and a prisoner is taken out in order to make their place available for a new arrival; or the flux of admissions is regulated and a person sentenced to imprisonment, or charged and placed on remand, waits at the prison gates, so to speak, for a place to become vacant. In the former case, a period of imprisonment is brought to an end for reasons that are not inherent to the character of the prisoner and the nature of the offence that they committed, but are solely attributable to circumstances with regard to prisoner numbers within the institution, a consideration that is totally foreign to the enforcement of the sentence of any prisoner that may thus be released. The sentences of two different prisoners, held at different times in the same institution, will therefore be enforced in different ways, without any reference to their characters and the offences committed. In the second case, individuals are obliged to wait at the gate after sentencing and, when their prison terms are finally enforced, one risks repeating what happened between 2010 and 2012: persons who had been completely rehabilitated since committing their offences were taken to prison months or years after the pronouncement of their sentences, a circumstance that inevitably thwarted their efforts to return to collective life in society. Indeed, what is at issue here, especially in the first case, is the constitutional principle of sentencing depending upon the individual requirements or characteristics of the defendant4. It would probably not be impossible to achieve results, while avoiding any direct link between the sentences enforced and the population levels within institutions, by taking action upstream rather than downstream (with regard to admissions rather than releases) and through rulings made by the State Prosecutor’s Office and the Bench, rather than through simple adjustment of the time of enforcement. In the second place, the assessment took a stand with regard to the appropriateness of an amnesty. Re-reading it as it was written, the amnesty in question very specifically concerned those convicted persons who were taken to prison long after their sentences had been pronounced – 4 Cf. the rulings of the Constitutional Council, implementing this principle drawn from article 8 of the Declaration of Human Rights, cited in the assessment. 14